The Elegance of the Hedgehog (19 page)

I
t’s certainly not boring with you around,” is the first thing Monsieur Ozu says to me once we are back in the kitchen and I am comfortably perched on my stool sipping lukewarm saké, which I find fairly bland.

“You are no ordinary person,” he adds, pushing in my direction a small bowl filled with little raviolis which look neither fried nor steamed but somewhere in between. Next to them he places a bowl of soy sauce.

“Gyozas,” he explains.

“On the contrary,” I reply, “I think I’m a very ordinary person. I’m a concierge. My life is a model of banality.”

“A concierge who reads Tolstoy and listens to Mozart. I did not know this was one of the skills required for your profession.”

And he winks at me. Without further ado he sits down beside me, and applies his chopsticks to his own serving of gyozas.

Never in my life have I felt so at ease. How can I explain? For the first time, I feel utterly trusting, even though I am not alone. Even with Manuela, to whom I would gladly entrust my life, I do not have this feeling of absolute security that comes when one is sure that understanding is mutual. Entrusting one’s life is not the same as opening up one’s soul, and although I love Manuela like a sister, I cannot share with her the things that constitute the tiny portion of meaning and emotion that my incongruous existence has stolen from the universe.

With my chopsticks I savor the gyozas stuffed with coriander and delicately spiced meat. Aware of a staggering sense of well-being, I chat with Monsieur Ozu as if we have known each other forever.

“One must have some entertainment, after all,” I say, “I go to the local library and borrow everything I can.”

“Do you like Dutch painting?” he asks and, without waiting for my reply, “If you were given the choice between Dutch painting and Italian painting, which would you rescue?”

We argue back and forth, a mock heated exchange where I take a passionate defense of Vermeer—but very quickly it becomes apparent that whatever we might say, we still agree with each other.

“You think it’s a sacrilege?” I ask.

“Not at all, chère Madame,” he replies, jauntily waving an unfortunate ravioli from left to right above his bowl, “not at all, do you think I would have copied a Michelangelo to have it hanging in my hallway?

“You dip the noodles in this sauce,” he adds, placing before me a wicker basket filled with noodles and a sumptuous blue-green bowl that is giving off an aroma of . . . peanuts. “This is a ‘zalu ramen,’ a dish of cold noodles with a slightly sweet sauce. Tell me if you like it.”

And he hands me a heavy linen napkin.

“There might be some collateral damage. Mind your dress.”

“Thank you.”

Goodness knows why, I add:

“It isn’t mine.”

I take a deep breath and say,

“You know, I’ve been living alone for so long and I never go out. I’m afraid I might be something of a noble savage.”

“A very civilized noble savage, in that case,” he says, smiling.

The taste of noodles dipped in peanut sauce is heavenly. I cannot, however, swear to the purity of Maria’s dress. It is not very easy to plunge a yard’s length of noodle into a semi-liquid sauce and then swallow it without making a bit of a mess. But as Monsieur Ozu is able to manage his own noodles quite adroitly, making a considerable amount of noise all the while, this removes any complex I might have: I proceed merrily to slurp up my long ribbons of noodle.

“Seriously,” says Monsieur Ozu, “do you not find it amazing? Your cat is called Leo, mine are Kitty and Levin, we both love Tolstoy and Dutch painting and we live in the same place. What are the odds of such a thing happening?”

“You shouldn’t have given me that beautiful book,” I say, “it wasn’t necessary.”

“Chère Madame,” replies Monsieur Ozu, “did it make you happy?”

“Well, of course it made me very happy, but also rather nervous. You know, I would like to remain discreet, I don’t want the people here imagining . . . ”

“ . . . who you are? Why?”

“I don’t want any fuss. No one wants a concierge who gives herself airs.”

“Airs? But you don’t give yourself . . . airs, you have taste, and qualities, you are enlightened!”

“But I’m the concierge! And anyway, I have no education, I’m not part of that world.”

“A fine affair!” says Monsieur Ozu in exactly the same way, would you believe, as Manuela, and this makes me laugh.

He raises an eyebrow, questioning.

“That’s my best friend’s favorite expression,” I say, by way of an explanation.

“And what does she say, your best friend, about your . . . discretion?”

To be honest, I haven’t a clue.

“You know her,” I say, “it’s Manuela.”

“Ah, Madame Lopes? She’s your friend?”

“She’s my only friend.”

“She is a great woman, an aristocrat. You see, you are not the only one who goes against the social norm. What’s the harm in that? This is the twenty-first century, for goodness’ sake!”

“What did your parents do?” I ask, somewhat ruffled by his lack of discernment.

No doubt Monsieur Ozu thinks that privilege disappeared with Zola.

“My father was a diplomat. I did not know my mother, she died shortly after I was born.”

“I am sorry.”

He makes a gesture with his hand, as if to say, it was long ago.

I forge ahead with my idea.

“You are the son of a diplomat, I am the daughter of impoverished peasants. It is inconceivable for me even to be having dinner here this evening.”

“And yet, you are having dinner here this evening.”

And he adds, with a very sweet smile, “And I am very honored.”

The conversation continues in this vein, good-natured and natural. We talk about, in order: Yasujiro Ozu (a distant relation); Tolstoy, and Levin mowing the field with his peasants; exile and the irreducibility of culture; and many other subjects which we debate in succession with the enthusiasm of discovering our shared interest, while enjoying the last of the mountain of noodles and, above all, the disconcerting similarity in the working of our minds.

At one point Monsieur Ozu turns to me and says:

“I would like for you to call me Kakuro, it would be so much less awkward. Do you mind if I call you Renée?”

“Not at all,” I reply—and I really do not mind.

Where have I suddenly found this ability to feel such ease in close company?

No answer is required for the time being, for the saké has muddled my brain in a quite delightful way.

“Do you know what azuki beans are?” asks Kakuro.

“The mountains of Kyoto . . . ” I say, smiling at my memory of infinity.

“What?”

“The mountains of Kyoto are the color of azuki bean paste,” I say, trying hard nevertheless to articulate.

“That’s from a film isn’t it?”

“Yes, in the
Sisters Munekata
, at the very end.”

“Oh, I saw that film a long time ago, but I don’t remember it very well.”

“Don’t you remember the camellia on the moss of the temple?”

“No, not at all. But you make me want to see it again. Would you like to watch it together some day soon?”

“I have the cassette, I haven’t taken it back to the library yet.”

“This weekend, perhaps?”

“Do you have a VCR?”

“Yes,” he says, smiling.

“That’s settled, then. But let me make the following suggestion: let’s watch the film at tea-time on Sunday, and I’ll bring the pastries.”

“Agreed,” says Kakuro.

The evening unfolds while we go on talking with little regard for coherence or the passage of time, endlessly sipping herbal tea with a strange seaweedy taste. Not surprisingly, I must renew my acquaintance with the snow-colored toilet bowl and the sun-bright carpet. I select the one-lotus-flower button this time—message received—and weather the assault of the
Confutatis
with all the serenity of a long-time regular. What is both disconcerting and marvelous about Kakuro Ozu is that he combines a sort of childish enthusiasm and candor with the attentiveness and kindliness of an old sage. I am not accustomed to such a relationship with the world; it seems to me that he views it with indulgence and curiosity, whereas the other human beings I know display either wariness and kindness (Manuela), ingenuity and kindness (Olympe) or arrogance and cruelty (everyone else). Such a combination of eagerness, lucidity and magnanimity is delightfully unusual.

And then I look down at my watch.

It is three o’clock.

I jump to my feet.

“Good Lord, have you seen the time?”

He consults his own watch then looks up with an anxious gaze.

“I had forgotten that you are working early tomorrow. I’m retired, I don’t pay any attention to that anymore. Will you be all right?”

“Yes, of course, but I have to get some sleep all the same.”

I do not mention the fact that in spite of my advanced age, although everyone knows old people do not sleep a lot, in my case I must sleep like a log for at least eight hours in order to have the slightest discernment in my dealings with the world.

“See you Sunday,” says Kakuro at his front door.

“Thank you so much, I’ve had a lovely evening, I’m very grateful to you.”

“It is I who am grateful to you. I haven’t laughed like that in a very long time, nor have I had such a pleasant conversation. Would you like me to walk you to your door?”

“No, thank you, there’s no need.”

There is always a potential Pallières lurking in the stairways.

“Well then, I’ll see you on Sunday,” I say, “unless we run into each other before then.”

“Thank you, Renée,” he says again, with a broad, childlike grin.

I close my own door behind me, and lean against it; there is Leo snoring away like a trumpet in the TV armchair, and I realize something unthinkable: for the first time in my life, I have made myself a friend.

And then, a summer rain.

I
remember that summer rain.

Day after day, we pace up and down our life the way we pace up and down a passageway.

Don’t forget the lung for the cat . . . have you seen my scooter this is the third time it’s gotten stolen . . . it’s raining so hard you’d think it was night . . . we’ll just make it, the next show is at one . . . do you want to take off your raincoat . . . cup of bitter tea . . . silence of the afternoon . . . perhaps we are sick from too much . . . all these
bonzes
to water . . . those giddy young things who run wild . . . look, it’s snowing . . . those flowers, what are they called . . . poor sweetie she was peeing all over the place . . . an autumn sky, how sad . . . it gets dark so early now . . . why does the garbage smell all the way out into the courtyard . . . you know, everything comes at its appointed time . . . no I didn’t know them especially well . . . they were a family like all the others here . . . it is the color of azuki bean paste . . . my son says the Chanese are very hard to deal with . . . what are his cats called . . . would you be so good as, to sign for the packages from the dry cleaner’s . . . all the Christmases these carols the shopping so tiring . . . when you eat a walnut you must use a tablecloth . . . his nose is running what do you know . . . it’s already hot it’s not even ten yet . . . I slice some mushrooms real thin and we have our bouillon with those mushrooms in it . . . she leaves her filthy underpants under the bed . . . we should redo the wallpaper . . .

And then, summer rain . . .

Do you know what a summer rain is?

To start with, pure beauty striking the summer sky, awe-filled respect absconding with your heart, a feeling of insignificance at the very heart of the sublime, so fragile and swollen with the majesty of things, trapped, ravished, amazed by the bounty of the world.

And then, you pace up and down a corridor and suddenly enter a room full of light. Another dimension, a certainty just given birth. The body is no longer a prison, your spirit roams the clouds, you possess the power of water, happy days are in store, in this new birth.

Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person’s soul something like endless breathing.

That is the way a summer rain can take hold in you—like a new heart, beating in time with another’s.

After two hours of gentle insomnia, I fall peacefully asleep.

Who presumes
To make honey
Without sharing the bee’s fate?

E
very day I tell myself that my sister cannot possibly sink any further into the slough of disgrace and, every day, I am amazed to see that she does.

This afternoon, after school, there was no one at home. I took some hazelnut chocolate from the kitchen and went to eat it in the living room. I was comfortably settled on the sofa, nibbling on my chocolate and ruminating on my next profound thought. I was thinking that it would be a profound thought about chocolate or the way you nibble it, in particular, with a central question: what is it that is so good about chocolate? The substance itself, or the technique of chewing it?

But however interesting I may have found my subject, I had not factored in the presence of my sister, who had come home earlier than expected and who immediately began to poison my existence by talking to me about Italy. Ever since she went to Venice with Tibère and his parents (staying at the Danieli), that’s all she talks about. To make things even worse, on Saturday they went to have dinner at some friends of the Grinpards’ who have a huge estate in Tuscany. Colombe now gets ecstatic just saying,
Tuuh
-scany, and Maman chimes in. In case you didn’t know, Tuscany is not an ancient land. It exists solely to give people like Colombe, Maman or the Grinpards a
frisson
of possession. Tuuh-scany belongs to them just as Culture and Art do, or anything else you can write with a Capital Letter.

Speaking of
Tuuh
-scany, then, I’ve already been treated to the donkeys, the olive oil, the light at sunset, the dolce vita and whatever other clichés they could come up with. But because each time I’d managed to slip away quietly, Colombe had not yet been able to try out her favorite story on me. So she made up for it when she saw me on the sofa and she spoiled my tasting session and my nascent profound thought.

On Tibère’s parents’ friends’ estate there are beehives, enough of them to produce a hundred kilos of honey a year. Even though the Tuscans hired a beekeeper who does all the work, they market their honey as “Flibaggi Estate.” Obviously, they don’t do it for the money. But “Flibaggi Estate” honey is considered to be one of the best in the world, and it adds to the owners’ prestige (they live off their private income) because it’s used in all the best restaurants by the most illustrious chefs, who make a great fuss about it . . . Colombe, Tibère and Tibère’s parents were treated to a tasting session, as if it were wine, and Colombe could go on forever about the difference between thyme honey and rosemary honey. That will really come in handy some day. Up to this point in her story, I was listening distractedly while thinking of my “crunching into the chocolate” and I figured if her story were to stop at this point I would be getting off lightly.

But you can’t ever hope for such a thing from Colombe. Suddenly she put on her superior air and started telling me about the behavior of bees. Apparently they were given an in-depth account and Colombe’s nasty little mind was particularly taken with the passage on the nuptial rites of queens and drones. The incredible organization of the hive, on the other hand, did not seem to make that much of an impression on her, although I think it’s fascinating, especially the fact that these insects have a coded language: all the claims that verbal intelligence is specifically human begin to seem rather relative. But that’s not the sort of thing that would ever interest Colombe—she’s not working toward a vocational training certificate to become a plumber after all, she’s after a master’s in philosophy. Nevertheless, she is absolutely titillated by the sexual lives of tiny creatures.

To sum up: the queen bee, when she is ready, takes off on her nuptial flight, pursued by a cloud of drones. The first drone to reach her copulates with her, then dies, because after the act his genital organ remains stuck inside. So he is amputated and this kills him. The second drone to reach the queen, in order to copulate with her, has to remove the genital organ of the previous drone with his feelers and, of course, the same thing will happen to him, and so on and so forth until you end up with ten or fifteen drones who have filled up the queen’s sperm pouch and will enable her, in the course of four or five years, to produce two hundred thousand eggs a year.

This is what Colombe is telling me, looking at me with her spiteful air, embellishing her story with saucy comments like, “She only gets one shot at it, huh, so she uses up fifteen drones!” If I were Tibère, I wouldn’t really appreciate my girlfriend going around telling everyone this story. Because, well, you can’t help but do a little bit of dime-store psychology: when a randy girl goes around saying that it takes fifteen males to satisfy one female and that to thank them she castrates them and kills them—well, you can’t help but wonder. Colombe is convinced this makes her look like the liberated-not-at-all-uptight-girl-who-talks-about-sex-perfectly-naturally. And Colombe is forgetting that she’s only telling
me
this story in order to shock me and that in addition the content of the story is not at all innocent. In the first place, for someone like me who thinks that people are animals, sexuality is not a salacious subject: it’s a scientific matter. It’s fascinating. And in the second place, I’d like to remind everyone that Colombe washes her hands three times a day and screams the moment she gets the slightest suspicion that there might be an invisible hair in the shower (visible hairs are more improbable). I don’t know why, but I think that all this goes very well with the sexuality of queens.

But above all it is crazy how people think that though they understand nature they can live without it. If Colombe is telling this particular story in this particular way, it’s because she thinks it has nothing to do with her. If she’s poking fun at the drones’ pathetic lovemaking, it’s because she is convinced she will never be subjected to anything remotely similar. But I don’t see anything shocking or saucy about the nuptial flight of the queens or the fate of the drones because I feel profoundly similar to all those creatures, even if our behavior differs. Living, eating, reproducing, fulfilling the task for which we were born, and dying: it has no meaning, true, but that’s the way things are. People are so arrogant, thinking they can coerce nature, escape their destiny of little biological things . . . and yet they remain so blind to the cruelty or violence of their own way of living, loving, reproducing and making war on their fellow human beings . . .

Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there’s anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us. Freedom, choice, will, and so on? Chimeras. We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.